Musings From Public Citizens, Coast to Coast

If there is a universal lesson to be learned from Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 — it’s that we should avoid painting people with too broad of a brush. We must work to get out of our own (often) self-imposed “bubbles” and pierce other ones, to remind your neighbor and fellow American that you’re still here too.

First off, I apologize. We got it wrong. But then again, so did everyone. While Agreeing Loudly got the numbers at the Presidential level wrong, if you look at our back catalogue of podcasts and articles, a lot of the analysis was there all year, serving as a caution and a warning that hard times and danger was ahead for the Democratic Party. Ultimately, I followed Nate Silver and the previously reliable polling aggregations. I said we’d barely hold out in 2016 and then 2018 and 2020 would be rough, which would then lead to rock bottom. 2016–meet rock bottom.

We do this site because we care about the future. We all get busy at times and have things get in the way but at the end of the day — I am incredibly proud of our first year-plus content. I want to encourage listenership to the back catalogue and readership of previous articles. I think it will help provide context to what was driving the decline of the Democratic Party.

I’d also like to point to a few of my favorite “Agreeing Loudly” contributor inventions:

Satire Is Pointless by Carson Starkey.

This is more true than ever now. I struggle to come up with the words of a great dark comedy that would equal this. Satire and reality truly have merged these past few years and AL.com contributor and MoE co-host Carson Starkey was right on top of that development. Which led us to…

Sadly, not satire.

I’d also like to call attention to the name of the site: Agreeing Loudly.

Intended or not, for me the namesake of this site is a reference to the “bubble.” We’ve all been in them. We’ve all lost sight of reality before because we were so focused on improving things and accomplishing the task at hand, surrounded by like-minded people.

The brilliant and nuanced podcast the “Margin of Error”, an essential listen featuring nearly weekly guests with co-hosts Allan Branstiter and Carson Starkey. The podcast manages to be simultaneously succinct and in-depth. I cannot help but think of the refrain I repeated all year about the ultimate 2016 result. Hillary Clinton will win by the margin of error. However, the funny thing about the margin of error is that by definition, the other candidate can win.

The Greater Recession: Party’s End (pre-written, now being slightly readjusted for the final result) was mentioned during the first and second parts to The Greater Recession article series. Party’s End of course refers to the Democratic Party. So while we missed the final numbers, I cannot say that I am overly surprised by what happened on November 8th.

Even if Hillary Clinton won on Tuesday, the problems of the Democratic Party existed and every contributor here at Agreeing Loudly ultimately believed some version of Tuesday was eventually going to happen, and it would happen no later than 2020. It looks like it has happened in 2016. We now know that the Obama coalition is entirely dependent on Obama (shocker… I know, something named after a person needs that person).

So where do we go from here? Ruminate on some of these themes I plan on discussing in the coming year.

The Political Spectrum doesn’t exist.

“We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.”

Please Join Us and Please Disagree Respectfully. Reach Out and Ask To Come On The Show. We want to hear from you, learn from you, and do everything in our power to help you all through this and build this site into something that you can take solace and ideas from as we prepare to exit into the long night that is the political wilderness.

Winston Churchill spent time in the wilderness. William F. Buckley created an intellectual movement of conservative principles while in the long political wilderness. It took him twenty five years to see the President that he had dreamed of. Something tells me that if Buckley were still alive, he would be mostly horrified by what just happened even though the movement he created now has more power than at any time since the 1920’s (which of course led to good things right… right?)

President-elect Trump is now mere months away from taking the Oath of Office. He is our President, but that doesn’t mean he is a good man. Because he is not. And if he wants me to change my mind on that he will have to show me something dramatically different.

We must pierce the bubble and learn. We must seek common and mutual understanding and stop speaking past one another if this country is to ever be united again in any meaningful way. I hope for the sake of all of us that President-elect Trump succeeds. I have my doubts. I strongly believe that you have to spend time in the batting cage to get a .300 batting average. Donald Trump has maybe watched some baseball games. Clearly he understands now what people like about it. But it will be very, very hard for him to hit .300 or even .200 or .100. Instead what we are seeing so far is hired guns on steroids, intent on threatening hundreds of years of our traditions and social contract. In these times, here is another thing to bring back: constitutionalist liberals.

Make no mistake the game will get played. And now more than ever, it must be a sell out crowd. Because the whole world is watching and worrying just like us.

Lets go to the ballgame. Lets sing the national anthem still. The team might finish in last place, but we have to show the world that we still care.

In the mean time and in the immediate term, lets take care of one another. We still have strength in numbers.

I ask those that will be vulnerable to be careful, be smart, be brave, and resilient. And I ask those who have privilege to love and support the vulnerable and the hated. It’s not just the bare minimum we can do right now and the right thing to do, but it is the only thing to do.

Call out hatred when you see it and stand up next to the hated. Not because you are trying to persuade the hater, but because we must show solidarity, love, and support for those that are hated.

2 thoughts on “Piercing the Bubble: Reflections on Tuesday”

None of this will ever be seen, let alone read, by those who most need to read it, because they live in a bubble whose walls consist of Fox News and their own Facebook circle–if indeed the see media at all. (I know those who don’t. At all.) If we can’t burst into that bubble, they only way those minds will change is when they finally die off.